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When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling

hiringengineersbook.com

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Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling

#251

Post by Matthias247 »

Great post! I can relate to that a lot.

One of my experiences was a recruiter for a startup (which plans to be leader in XYZ) reaching out for me on LinkedIn. Since I found the general domain quite interesting, I responded. From there on we have a short chat, but instead of getting really insightful information on the job I get forwarded to a bunch of URLs which aim to describe things. I get that it's convenient for the company to save time - but I don't want to spend hours reading through things.

Then there is an interview loop. 2 of the interviewers are apparently fairly junior, and spend the whole interview asking the typical graduate coding problems. One of them even wasn't sophisticated with having things 80% solved - it needed to be 100% - even though that meant the whole timeslot was used up. In the end of those in-person interviews I learned nothing about the job because there was no time left.

The main thing I learned was that there are people there who can be pedantic on interviews and can solve basic coding problems. If anything that gives me a negative impression. I want to work together with people who know interesting technologies, know how to write well-structured code, etc. The interview might give the impression that they don't know these things, because all they ask for is how to solve a leetcode problem.

After that the company asks for another interview loop at a different place - which obviously would mean spending even more time on this. At that point I'm giving up.

Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling

#252

Post by projektir »

sethammons wrote: post #147
tptacek wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again: this is true of "work sample" tests in their mainstream implementation in our industry (spend 6 hours jumping through a hoop for the privilege of running a standard, nondeterministic interview gauntlet), and those hiring processes are a scourge. But there's a right way to do it: give work sample challenges and then, at least for the most part, end the technical qualification part of your process there . You sp…

We subscribe to the work sample test as your best option for technical validation, but we also limit ourselves to a small window of time, on site. We pick something we recently worked on, distill it down to something we can knock out in 15 minutes, and give the candidate about 45 minutes to work through the distilled problem and then we explore for about 15 minutes their solution and how they would make it production…

> The part I'm battling on it is if the current coding part selects against Java developers.

Yes, it does. And let me put it this way: I've used C# and Java at most of my jobs, those theoretically would be my comfort languages, yes?

I do not use those languages on interviews. I often just use C++ (!), or Rust (free unit tests!) if the company tools allow for it, or worst case I'd learn some Python basics. C#/Java are very awkward and boilerplatey in such a small time frame as 45 minutes.

Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling

#253

Post by gedy »

LaserToy wrote: post #186

Context: 15 years of experience, multiple public talks (including AWS reInvent), own chunk of infra serving hundreds millions users. Got a message from yet another self driving startup. Agreed to do a phone screen out of curiosity. Interviewer is 6 months out of school and his first question - why do you want to work for us. My answer - I actually don’t, I didn’t even know you exist and it is your job to convince me.…

This a big problem I've seen as a senior dev. Interviewers almost always default to "why do you want to work here, prove yourself, etc", and question accordingly. This is hugely off-putting to passive candidates who are busy with their current roles, etc.

Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling

#254

Post by virgilp »

hobs wrote: post #244
bloomer wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no way to copyright someone else's work. Whoever produced the solution owns the copyright.

That is probably incorrect in the United States if it is "Work made for hire". https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ09.pdf

I doubt they paid for the interview work.

Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling

#255

Post by [deleted] »

AznHisoka wrote: post #139
xfitm3 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why doesn't the gopher archetype also apply to development roles? Persistence pays off if you measure your own results. Knowing how to divide a problem is really important, even if you're great at algorithms.

I can’t overemphatize how much persistence really paid off in past jobs I had. Coworkers that had persistence were such a delight to work with because they didnt give up the first time they got stuck. They did the nitty gritty work of tailing/grepping logs, using a debugger, endless Googling, print statements, and anything to find out the root cause of a bug... or even to understand a legacy codebase.

[deleted]

Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling

#256

Post by souprock »

burlesona wrote: post #165
landryraccoon wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Alternately, make it 1 acre, but within a 5-minute commute. Wait what? What city are you talking about that has a tech hub or commercial center within a 5 minute commute of 1 acre homes?

Forget about a tech hub, what city with jobs at all. Ten acres is more like a small farm than a house, by definition at that lot size almost nothing can be within five minutes, lol.

My area almost qualifies. Right now there is a home on 1.16 acres going for $275,000 that is 7 minutes away from my employer and 10 minutes away from a rather large employer.

We have sort of a specialist tech hub here, featuring stuff like radar and cyberwar. Lots of these companies are hiring. (mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18819736)

You can get more than ten acres if you are willing to commute a bit. I think 2.5 acres is the minimum lot size if you go south about 14 minutes from one of my workplace's buildings, or 22 minutes from the one I'm in.

It is a small farm. Senior engineers can afford to live on hobby farms. Some of them expect to do so. It's not just here either; I've known people who did that in relatively rural parts of Massachusetts and Virginia too.

I recall somebody on HackerNews proposing an interesting explanation for how people react. The available jobs get dismissed because you'd have to seriously consider moving (which is annoying) if you admitted that employment in these locations is viable.

Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling

#257

Post by projektir »

james_s_tayler wrote: post #239
projektir wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would make me damn uncomfortable and stressed out once I started the job, and I'd likely take any other offer over this.

This is how all hiring works by law where I'm from. It's fine.

Sounds like you may also be from a country with a decent social net along with it?

Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling

#258

Post by burtonator »

What I find hilarious is how every VC podcast about bootstrapping your startup has both of these statements 30 seconds apart:

1. ALWAYS hire the best you can. Hire people smarter than you. Hire the smartest people in the world!

2. It's always impossible to hire! We can never hire anyone!

Yeah. Ya think?

What I try to do is actually the opposite of their advice.

I don't look for the perfect hire. I look for people who are often overlooked but COULD become the perfect hire.

Just get them in at an affordable salary and build them into your best engineers.

They will be amazingly loyal (since you gave them chance when they needed it) and you can train them to become PART of the team.

You DO need senior people for this strategy though. They need mentors.

Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling

#260

Post by tracer4201 »

dhjsnana83 wrote: post #169

There is a lot of complaining about hiring processes these days. I think both algorithmic questions and work samples have an important role. Algorithmic questions are presented with a time lot, you get an idea of how the candidate thinks through problems. These questions I think reflect general intelligence. Work samples reflect effort and experience, which is also important. People like to complain about one or the…

>I think both algorithmic questions and work samples have an important role.

I'm a senior engineer at one of the top tech companies. I hold the opinion the interview processed is heavily biased towards college grads or kids who are fresh on algorithms.

I think this helps us hire mostly kids who are book smart but aren't necessarily great (or even "good") employees... I'll do some hand waving here and define good as some combination of being driven and motivated, being able to work independently, and actually caring about what they're doing.

The question is then - well, how do we do this better? Honestly, I'm not sure. Hiring quality workers is a difficult problem. Technical interviews allow you to somewhat measure one of the key aspects of your hire. That being said, some people aren't made to stand in front of a white board and get judged. They don't handle that situation really well, and just because of that, they'll make mistakes that they might not otherwise make.

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